


Silence

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:18:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An attempt by the Survey Corps to reclaim Wall Maria fails when a titan shifter loses control and summons hundreds of titans with their scream. Bertholdt Fubar and other survivors try to process the aftermath. </p><p>Warning: Contains SNK Manga spoilers!!! LOTS of manga spoilers! Do not read this if you have not read the manga.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gerbera Daisies

**Author's Note:**

> This fic began when I was listening to sad music and thinking about Bertholdt and Reiner. It's a horrible sad mess and it's basically intended to make you very, very upset. I hope you have as much fun reading this as I did writing it (no fun, only pain).

There came a time when the noises of battle crescendoed and hit a climax.  


After that, all noises seemed to slowly drop away as if an orchestra of pain had forgotten when they were supposed to cut off. The climax of crashing and fighting wasn’t nearly as terrifying as what came after: the slow, disjointed yelling in the distance and the faraway sounds of gas tanks running empty and soldiers plummeting to the ground with eery screams.  


When the world seemed to have stilled and all that remained was an agonizing hum, Bertholdt moved his hands away from his eyes. He could hear his own breathing in and out, in and out, in and out as he slowly stood up and looked around at his surroundings. The first thing he noticed, out of everything, was a single flower, a gerbera daisy, standing as if trying to tell Bertholdt, “all of this is your fault.” It was growing on a patch of earth untainted by blood, in between two bodies. No.... one body. One body that had been torn into two pieces across the waist.  


Bertl’s breath stopped and he quickly looked away and covered his mouth to avoid throwing up. But there was blood in front of him there, too. So much carnage.... so much, everywhere he looked....  


He threw up, unable to contain it anymore. The nausea wasn’t brought on by the gore, but rather by disgust--pure, all-encompassing disgust with himself. What kind of human being could allow something like this to happen? What kind of person could.... could do this?  


With one sleeve, he wiped the bile away from his mouth and turned back towards the torn-apart corpse. He tried not to breath through his nose and took slow, cautious steps towards the single flower, trying to determine who exactly had died right there, right in front of him, while he cowered in a ball. As he got closer and closer, recognition began to set in.  


“No..... no, no.” He ran one hand through his hair and looked into the cold, dead eyes of Sasha Braus. His brain was telling him to run, to hide, to cry and scream and scream and scream and not stop screaming until everything faded away and he could no longer remember the exact expression on her face.  


But he stayed. If only for a moment, Bertholdt Fubar tried to be brave. The gore and blood from his comrade’s remains was splayed across the ground like some sort of sick, horrific piece of modern art, but he tried to block it out of his vision as he slowly bent down and, hands trembling, closed her eyes.  


 _She’s peaceful like this,_ he thought, _It’s... it’s the least I can do. The least....._ His body crumbled into tiny spasms of grief and he kept thinking to himself, _You didn’t deserve this, you didn’t deserve this, you didn’t deserve this, you didn’t--_  


A loud, devastating roar shook the ground and knocked him backwards into a sitting position, his clothing becoming stained with blood. He looked up and away from Sasha, to the direction the sound had come from. He knew that voice. _Annie._ Something was wrong, very wrong. Something besides the bodies as far the eye could see.  


He stood up and ran back to the tree he had been huddled against to grab his broken swords. The blades were dulled and chipped, but he needed... he needed something. After all of this, after everything, it seemed wrong to die without some sort of fight. Bertholdt’s life was worth something. Not something good, probably, but something nonetheless.  


Before he left, he gathered some leaves from the bottom of the tree and brought them to Sasha’s corpse. _Don’t cry._ Continuing to try to ignore the fact that her body was split in two, he laid the leaves around her head like a halo. _Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry._ He picked the daisy from the ground and laid it on her chest, enclosing her fingers around the thin stem. _Don’t cry._  


The roar resounded through the trees again, louder this time. It shook through Bertl’s bones as he stood up and turned away from Sasha for the last time. Clearing his face of all emotion, he ran towards the sound of the distant titan’s screams.  


_I’m sorry._  
 _I’m so sorry._


	2. Vapor

There was no blood on the ground, here--just dead grass and dirt. The grass hadn’t been dead for a very long time, which Bertl knew because of the titan vapor clouding the air. The heat has cooked all of the plants in the nearby vicinity to brown dust, blending in with the dirt. 

The grass wasn’t what worried him; the titan smoke was. He knew Annie was in her titan form, or had been, but this vapor signaled to him that someone--Annie, Reiner, Eren or Ymir, had recently exited or had been forced out of their titan form. Something was really, really wrong. It had seemed bad before, but he felt now that something terrible had happened or was going to.

Trying to focus his breathing and avoid panicking, Bertholdt pushed through the slowly lifting vapor, the heat of the area increasing as he, presumably, got closer to the body of whatever titan was causing this vapor. As a giant foot came into view, he felt his heart beating out of his chest. He knew that foot. He knew that skin. 

This titan form belonged to Reiner Braun. 

The earth seemed to fall away beneath him as he broke into a sprint, past the foot, which had been cut away from the rest of the leg. _Shit._ The arm came into view in a few seconds and he scrambling up it, dropping his blades on the ground so that he could move faster. 

Reiner was waist-deep in the titan, and was cursing profusely as he tried to pull himself out. 

“Reiner!” Bertl and ran over to him. Reiner grabbed Bertholdt’s arm.  
“Shh!” He said, putting his hand over Bertl’s mouth. “She’s nearby. Don’t want to clue her in to where we are.”  
“Who’s nearby?”  
“Ackerman.” 

Bertholdt paused, eyes widening. He thought everyone had died. Of course it would be Ackerman who survived. “Damn it,” he muttered, “How did she cut through your armor?”

“Never mind that,” Reiner quickly replied, “The bonds with my body are too strong this time--I’m stuck. Come on, grab my torso and help me get out before she finds us.”

Bertholdt bent down with his lanky form and hooked his arms through Reiner’s armpits, summoning whatever strength that he had left, which was not much. The steam from the titan stung his eyes, so he lowered them to slits. Reiner shifted impatiently underneath him.

“We don’t have all day,” he hissed, the red scorch marks of the titan transformation still etched onto his complexion. Like this, with his teeth bared, shirt ripped and face covered in markings like intricate scars, Bertholdt thought that Reiner truly looked like a warrior. _The_ warrior. A unique aura seemed to surround them as Bertholdt began to tug the other boy’s torso out of the burning titan carcass. The titan below them was not the winner of battles. It had been a help, for sure, but Reiner himself was the one who fought for their cause.

_Flash._ Sasha’s bloody face appeared in the air front of him. “What _was_ your cause, Bertholdt? What could be worth all of this? What was I to you? _Nothing?”_ The impact of her words hit him like a truck and embedded itself into his very being, leaving him without air and causing him to collapse, relinquishing his grip on Reiner. 

The world went into slow-motion as his limbs fell away beneath him, but as soon as his head hit the armor of Reiner’s titan form, the floating face is gone. Reiner tried to turn around, but everything from the mid-thighs and down was still wedged in the titan flesh. “Bertl!” He whispered urgently, a strain of panic evident in his tone. “What happened? Are you okay?! I can’t see anything!”

Bertholdt’s vision faded in and out of blackness until he could see, but even then, the world was spinning around him and he found himself very confused. He could hear a male voice calling his name, but the other words were muddled beyond recognition. What was happening to him? Why was he on the ground? The more he thought about it, the louder the chanting in his head grew, driving itself into his brain like a nail being pounded in by a hammer.

_What was your cause? Why did you do this? What kind of monster **are** you?_

This time, the voice wasn’t Sasha’s--it was his. Again and again, beating into his skull, burning through his thought receptors like a wildfire, stabbing tiny needles into his head again, again, again, again like bad acupuncture. _Oh no._ He couldn’t move or speak or do anything but lie there as waves of nausea and guilt passed over him. _Leave me be, Braus. Why can’t you just leave me be?_

And suddenly Bertholdt could hear Reiner’s yelling loud and clear. “I just saw her! Oh god, Bert, get up, you bastard, get up. Ackerman’s found us! Shit.” The fog was clearing and Bertl could see movement: the top of Reiner’s head as he continued to struggle, mostly. But then..... black hair. A blur of movement flashed across his range of eyesight and he couldn’t make out any features of the figure except for medium-length, jet-black hair.

He jerked his arms back towards his body and reached a hand to the nape of his neck by instinct. Jolting upward, he looked around but the figure was nowhere in sight. He grabbed Reiner’s arms again and kept pulling and Reiner was yelling but whatever he was saying went a thousand miles over Bertholdt’s head because he was busy listening for _her._

Everything became uncomfortably silent as Reiner quieted down and realized what his friend was doing. The vapor was fading but it wasn’t gone yet and visibility was still bad. With fog on all sides, the figure could come from any direction at any moment. Beads of sweat formed on Bertholdt’s forehead and he found himself feeling claustrophobic. _It feels too empty, here._

But then Reiner’s feet were the only things left still in the titan and Bertholdt let his guard down for just a moment to tend to his friend but then, _whoosh,_ there she was, right in front of them, black hair flying in every direction. 

_Mikasa Ackerman. Exemplary performance in every subject. A genius of unprecedented skill._

Her eyes.... her eyes seemed to be glowing, and it scared Bertholdt. It scared him more than anything he’d seen in a very, very long time. They shone with a ferocity that he had never seen before and it occurred to him that something had broken inside of the teenage girl in front of him. Her arms were held out from her sides like an open mouth, fangs at the ready. Her red scarf was ripped, with the end completely torn off. 

_This is wrong._

His brain told him, and he knew it was true. This was not Mikasa, the protective almost-mother. This was not Mikasa, savior of humanity. This was most certainly not Mikasa, his former friend. This was not even Mikasa at all. This was a nameless monster of rage and hate and grief, oh god, _such grief._

Eren Jaeger was dead. Bertholdt had not seen the body or been given any sort of confirmation for this hypothesis, but the expression on the face of the girl in front of him said it as clear as day. Everything that this girl was had been replaced with some sort of incredible, blinding madness--the human embodiment of wrath. 

And she was here for revenge.

A knot appeared in his throat and he swallowed it. There was a sudden flash of metal and Bertholdt closed his eyes, pulling Reiner to his chest. This was it. This.... this was it. This was the end of the traitors, the end of the warrior and the end of the tall, lanky boy with too much guilt on his conscience.

But when the pain hit, it was only that of a simple pin prick. He waited two seconds, then opened his eyes, expecting to find a white blankness or a fiery hell. He found neither. Instead, he found that the very tip of Mikasa’s sword had punctured his abdomen. The rest of the sword had been thrust all of the way through the short, lithe body of Annie Leonhardt.

And when he looked at the blonde girl’s face, she was smiling. Bertholdt didn’t.... he didn’t think he’d ever seen her smile. Never really, truly, honestly. But this.... this was a real smile, a genuine one. She looked directly into the shocked and wide eyes of Mikasa, grinning and laughing. 

“Hah!” She coughed up blood. “I win, Ackerman--” More blood. “This time, I can be a good person for _myself.”_ A spurt of dark red blood dribbled out of the hole in her chest, making Bertholdt want to turn around and puke. 

Mikasa’s eyes were wide with shock and disgust as she looked into the eyes of the girl impaled on her sword. Time stopped, the vapor clearing more and more with each second. It was so silent that Bertl could hear each solitary sizzle of blood as it fell from Annie’s chest or mouth and onto the hot titan flesh. 

Then, Annie did something that made all members of the party gasp. She started _moving._ Not, like, wiggling. She was walking towards Mikasa, impaling herself on the sword more deeply with every step until she was face-to-face with the pale girl. A slight breeze drifted through the clearing, ruffling their hair oh-so-slightly.

Annie brought her face so close to Mikasa’s that Bertholdt was sure, for a moment, that they were going to kiss. They didn’t. Instead, he saw the silver metal of a knife plunge into Mikasa’s chest. 

The asian girl’s jaw dropped and there was a sharp intake of breath, but nothing else. Annie twisted the knife around a bit and then spat in the other girl’s face, smirking. When she spoke, her voice came out as a clear, concise whisper, filled with bitterness. 

“Mikasa.....” A small stream of blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth. “Fall.”

With that, Annie wrenched the sword out of her chest and pushed Mikasa off of the shoulder of the huge titan body. Her body fell slowly, as if through water. As she fell out of sight, her ebony-black hair swallowed her face. Bertholdt didn’t see her hit the ground, but he heard it. A sickening crack. Then, nothing. 

Not five seconds after Mikasa’s lifeless body connected with the earth, Annie’s body fell, limp, onto the surface of the titan, her neck bent at an unnatural angle. Reiner and Bertholdt sat for a moment, unable to move or speak, watching as Annie’s eyes glazed over, her lips parting to mouth the words, _I win._

Reiner was the first to break. He ripped himself from Bertl’s arms, scrambling towards Annie’s blood-soaked body with no amount of finesse. Still weak from exiting the titan form, he slipped and fell into a puddle of his friend’s blood. Coughing, he got up to his knees and pulled Annie’s thin frame to his chest, smothering it. Bertholdt watched from a distance as his friend was consumed by body-wracking sobs. 

“No- oh, no, oh god, no. No, fuck. Fuck, Annie, wake up, god damn it, wake up, you stone-cold bitch, wake up,” he sniveled, slow tears rolling down his cheeks. Bertholdt turned away, but he couldn’t escape Reiner’s stumbling, grief-filled words. 

“No... no, Leonhardt, you come back to us, you come back right now, or, or-- I swear I’ll--” He was interrupted by Bertholdt’s hand softly touching his shoulder. 

“Reiner... we had better go.” Bertholdt’s tried to make himself sound kind and gentle or empathetic or something, _anything,_ but he just sounded mechanical. This wasn’t something he was equipped to handle. Sasha, Eren, Mikasa, and now Annie. It was sick. It was sick and twisted in every possible way.

He ignored the guilt gnawing at his conscience and repeated himself. “We should go, really. We don’t know who else survived and I’d like to get somewhere with slightly-better visibility.” He grabbed his friend’s arm and started to pull him up, but Reiner swatted it away. 

Standing up, he confronted Bertholdt. “Look,” he muttered, still holding Annie’s thin form, “I know that grief isn’t really _your_ area of ‘expertise,’ but I know that Annie deserves more than the attention you’re giving her, which is none.” His voice was choked up from emotion, and Bertholdt couldn’t help feeling remorseful. 

“Look, Reiner, I--” His mouth was covered with a strong hand before he could continue, and the two of them made eye contact. Reiner’s eyes were steely, with redness around the outside from both the titan marks and the crying. 

“No, Bertl. I- I don’t care.” He swallowed, slowly removing his hand from Bertholdt’s mouth. “I know you aren’t as neutral as you’re pretending to be. I can see it in your eyes. So.... don’t try to fool me.”

With that, Reiner stepped away, down the right leg of his evaporating titan body. Bertholdt followed tentatively, feeling the dark blackness in his chest growing with every second. It would consume him, someday, and there would be nothing left but an empty shell of Bertholdt Fubar, nothing but a colossal waste.

At the end of the leg was..... another leg. Reiner hopped from one foot onto another, the foot of Annie Leonhardt’s titan form. When the two of them had reached the nape of the neck, they stopped. Bertholdt watched as Reiner squatted down and slowly, carefully, placed Annie’s lifeless body back inside the hole in the neck she had come out from.Face down in the titan vapor, she almost looked alright. That was, if you ignored the smears of blood all around them from the sword wound. 

Reiner turned around and grabbed Bertholdt by the shoulders, steering him off of the titan. The two of them hopped down and Bertl continued to follow his friend as he walked fifty, one-hundred, two-hundred feet away. There, they stopped and watched the titan form.

Ten minutes later, Annie Leonhardt, along with her last titan form, were gone. A breeze moved through the air, rustling the hair of the two remaining boys. In the descending twilight, Reiner reached his hand toward Bertholdt’s and grabbed it, entwining his shorter fingers around the taller boy’s long ones. Bertholdt let out a long sigh as Reiner began to speak. 

“Promise me that you’ll let me evaporate with my titan form when I die, alright?” He asked of his friend, though the other stayed silent. “Come on, Bertl.”

Sighing once more, Bertholdt pulled his hand out of Reiner’s grasp and began to walk away. “Alright.”

Dusk fell over the battlefield as the two boys walked away, one nearly in tears and one trying with all of his might _not_ to cry. Annie Leonhardt’s body was gone, evaporated with her titan. Mikasa Ackerman’s remained, even after Reiner’s titan form was gone, her joints bent into unnatural angles. There was minimal blood outside of her body, but many of the veins inside had raptured with the fall. For a certain number of minutes after the fall, she lay, gasping for breath, blood collecting inside of her throat.

She died alone, filled with the repeating thought of _I’ve failed._

They had all failed, in the end. Reiner knew this and Bertholdt knew this as they sat next to a fire in the woods that night, not speaking to each other and mourning more than just lost comrades.


	3. Resignation, Goodbye

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flowers of the Cyclamen genus are generally taken to represent a resignation or farewell.
> 
> Gerbera Daisies are generally taken to embody thoughts of absent friends.

A cloak of darkness reigned over the sky, shrouding the hills in dusk. Silence lived here, in this twilight realm. Everything seemed to be paused mid-scene, as if whoever was watching had been so horrified at the events that they could not continue. Bodies lay everywhere, scattered far and wide within a ten mile radius. 

In the shadows, a voice cried out. 

“Hey, there’s another one!” Connie Springer’s voice rang out through the hills as he shouted back to his comrades. Other than Connie, the small group consisted of Jean Kirschtein, Armin Arlert. Jean’s arm was in a makeshift sling, torn from one of Armin’s pant legs. As they walked, Armin felt the sting of cold on the one pant leg that was really more of a capri, but he ignored it. There were.... there were bigger things to worry about.

“Oi, Connie, keep your voice down, some of the traitors might still be alive,” Jean muttered, spitting on the word “traitor.”

As they were walking, Armin looked into the sky. _What beautiful colors,_ he thought, admiring the violet undertones. Then, he looked at the trees a few hundred feet in front of them. Then, he looked at the ground, then the sky again, then his own calloused hands. He looked at anything but the bodies, so many bodies, everywhere. He tried to think of everything, _anything_ but the events of a few hours ago.

He failed. It all came rushing back in an instant, forcing him to his knees and grinding his exposed leg into rocks and dirt. Jean called his name, but he didn’t respond.

_The wind brushes through Armin’s hair as he rides on his horse. The sky is blue and the sun is shining, but clouds are coming. It will, rain, soon, he can tell. His horse passes a group of wildflowers. Armin quickly looks around for anyone watching, and when he finds that there are none, he stops his horse and hops off._

_Quickly and deftly, he plucks a single pink flower from the ground and carefully places it in his satchel. Hopping back on his horse, he speeds up so as to not break formation.  
He rides for several minutes without incident or any titan sightings. So far, so good. Personally, he thinks that this mission is a disaster waiting to happen. Erwin had told the majority of the scouting legion that it was an attempt to reach Wall Maria and plug the hole. Armin, however, knows that this is a far too ambitious goal. The real aim of this mission, Armin predicts, is to find and capture Reiner Braun, Bertholdt Fubar and Ymir. _

_Armin looks around, having been lost in his thoughts for a moment. The moment he does, he knows that something is wrong, or is going to be. The air is still and silent, like the universe is about to collapse in on itself without a moment’s notice. His horse seems uncomfortable, too, and Armin has an unusual amount of trouble getting it to move. As they approach a small group of trees (not as large as the giant trees in the encounter with the female titan), the horse becomes more and more resistant, refusing to move forward._

_Armin’s eyes dart from side to side, wary. He slowly slides one of his swords out of the sheath and holds it at the ready. On one hand, going into the forest means the ability to use his 3dmg effectively. On the other..... staying outside means avoiding whatever dangers lie in the forest. He only has a few moments to decide._

_He doesn’t even get those moments. A few seconds later, a gigantic lightning bolt crashes down from the sky and an orange tint glows at the edges of the forest. It becomes quickly apparent which titan form has manifested as a huge mass of muscle grows out of the middle of the forest, turning into the largest titan, the one controlled by Bertholdt Fubar. Steam spews out of the colossal titan’s muscles, making vision difficult. It floats over to where Armin is and stings his eyes, slowly burning at the retinas with it’s heat._

_He is distracted by the steam when he hears it. A scream. No, not a scream: a roar. It shakes the very ground below him and causes his horse to freak and drop him. He covers his ears, unable to move with the vibrations currently shaking his body and rattling him down to the core._

_When the sound starts to die down after about a minute, he looks around frantically for his horse, but the animal is nowhere to be seen. Neither, in fact, is the colossal titan. It’s done another disappearing act. Realizing his predicament, Armin collects his satchel and sprints towards the trees. If he could climb one.... maybe he’d be safe. From the regular titans, at least. From titan shifters..... not so much._

_When he gets there, he starts to scramble up the first climbable tree that he sees. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement and his head snaps to the side. Deeper into the forest, about three hundred feet back, is Bertholdt Fubar. He’s just standing there, looking at Armin with shaking, wild eyes. Armin has never seen a titan shifter’s eyes change, before. He looks about ready to collapse, with long, reddened titan marks around his bloodshot eyes._

_Bertholdt seems to realize that Armin has seen him, and runs to the side, where Armin can’t see him. Deciding that this is more important than his own bodily safety, Armin shouts, “Hey, stop!” When Bertl doesn’t respond, he runs after him, swords drawn. But when he gets around the corner of trees, the taller boy is gone._

_Armin leans against a tree, despondent. Then, the feeling comes to him again. **Something is still wrong.** He looks around and notices nothing at first. Then, comes the pounding. A series of thuds reverberate through the ground, like giant footsteps._

_And then it hits him. Bertholdt has done the same thing that Annie had done so many months ago to escape being captured. He has called a horde of titans with his roar. And, what with the sheer volume of his roar, Armin realizes that there will soon be more titans in this area than he or anyone else has ever seen in one place, before._

_Upon realizing this, he climbs a tree as fast as possible and gets as high in said tree as he can. It’s not high enough. There are titans coming from every direction, hundreds, no **thousands** of them. This is not the forest of giant trees. These trees are not high enough, not nearly high enough, to keep Armin safe, and he knows it. _

_The titans collide with the forest in a solid mass, making the trees shaking and bend and break. Armin is close to the middle of the small forest, but they’ll be here any moment. He opens his satchel and pulls out the flower, trying to remember from his book of the outside world what it is called._

_Cyclamen. This flower is part of the cyclamen genus. As for the exact species, he does not remember. He brings it to his nose and sniffs, but he smells nothing. Looking down, he tucks it into the pocket of his jacket. As he awaits his death, Armin daydreams about dancing. He’s dancing with a beautiful girl, a blonde one, in his parent’s courtyard. But no matter how he tries, he can’t seem to catch a glimpse of her face. He looks straight ahead, towards the oncoming titans, but all he sees is the hair of the blonde girl, tied back into a messy bun._

_“Armin,” she whispers, her voice devoid of any particular emotion. He hears his name spoken again, but this time louder and more frantic. It’s a male voice. Shaking himself back into reality, he looks for the source and sees Jean yelling at him from an adjacent tree._

_“Jean!” He yells back. “Did you see what happened earlier?”_

_“Yeah, but this isn’t the time to talk about that.” the boy shouts through the air, “We should probably focus on, you know, not dying! Got any idea how we’re gonna manage that?”_

_Armin pauses and looks around him. He hadn’t really thought about it, honestly. **Armin, you fool,** he chastises himself, **you were going to just let yourself die?** He lets himself think for a moment, and then he turns to Jean. “I’ve got it.” _

Armin returned to reality, feeling Jean’s firm hand on his shoulder. He was kneeling in the dirt, with pebbles becoming embedded in his kneecap. Connie was standing in front of him, calling his name. He took a deep breath and looked up, shaking himself free of the flashback.

“I’m sorry, guys, I just.... I lost it, I’m sorry.” He tried to clear his voice of emotion and Jean patted his back, understanding.

“It’s okay, we were just worried is all,” Connie iterated, a smile tugging at the edges of his mouth but failing to go all the way through to his eyes. Jean exchanged a look with Connie and they helped Armin to his feet. 

“Come on,” Jean urged, adjusting the position of his arm in the blood-soaked swing. “Let’s go see who else has been freed from this hell of a world.” Connie had already gone ahead of them, and Jean and Armin walked in complete silence until they saw Connie fall to his knees a hundred feet in front of them.

Jean walks faster but doesn’t run, not wanting to injure his arm. Armin sprints. “Connie!” He shouts, afraid of what he will find when he reaches him, “Who is it?”

The other boy does not answer, but Jean and Armin see what caused him to do this as clear as day. There, lying in the dirt amidst smears of her own blood, is the torn-apart body of Sasha Braus. Her eyes are closed, there’s a wreath of flowers around her head, and there is a Gerbera Daisy in her clenched hand. Armin opens his mouth to breath, but no oxygen comes in. Connie lets out a broken sob, covering his face with his hands.

“Why did it have to be her?” He slurs, slamming his fist down into the red-tinted ground. Armin and Jean stay silent, lost in their own emotions. “I- we- we said we’d meet up tonight, when we’d set camp. She.... she said that she had a joke to tell me.” After that, Connie’s words become unrecognizable muddles of emotion.

Armin stood there for a few minutes in complete shock, half-listening to Connie. Absentmindedly, he swiped a stray hair out of his eyes, only to find that he was crying and he hadn’t even noticed. Jean was the first to say anything coherent.

“Who did that?”

“What?”

“I mean, who put those leaves and that flower there?” Jean asked, his tone trembling. Armin knew that he was trying to be strong, but he didn’t see the point of trying to keep up the cool-guy facade, anymore. 

Connie wiped his cheeks and a confused expression darted onto his complexion. “I don’t know....”

“Whoever they are,” Armin added, swallowing back the scream that was trying to wriggle it’s way out of his throat, “I’m glad they did this. She.... she deserves--” 

Connie cuts him off. “She deserves to look beautiful.”

Silence settled into the space between the three boys and it occured to Armin how much Connie really, truly cared about Sasha. They never formally dated, but it was sort of.... implied. Now, he was looking at the her body, torn in half. It was the stuff of nightmare, like a horror story from their childhood or a bad romance novel. No one said a word for about thirty seconds, until Connie turned his back on the corpse. With a stone-cold expression, he snarled,  
“Those bastards titan-shifters are going to pay with their lives for what they’ve done.”

Jean nodded, and Armin looked at him with an torn expression. _Why do more people have to die? Why not end the killing now?_ But he didn’t say what he was thinking, and instead gave a half-hearted nod in Connie’s direction. 

More silence. Then, Jean pointed towards a faraway hill with his working arm. “Look, there.” Their heads turned towards the hill and saw a residual cloud of titan vapor. 

Jean continued. “Odds are, the titan-shifter that just came out of that body is one of the sons-of-bitches that caused this to happen.” Connie didn’t wait to reply, he just grabbed a sword from Sasha’s broken 3dmg and took off towards the source of the vapor. Jean followed, but Armin waited behind for a moment. 

He looked down at Sasha with soft eyes. Inside of his body, Armin felt cracked. Something.... something inside him was shattering. Looking away, he observed the wall of clouds passing over the sky. 

_“It’s about to rain,” Armin tells Jean, yelling so that his friend, on a tree about 15 meters away, will hear him loud and clear. “The titans won’t be able to keep a proper hold on us, it’ll be too slick. There are so many titans that they almost form a pathway. If we’re careful, we could cross their heads to get out of this area.”_

_“That’s insane!” Jean replies, his mouth gaping open at the foolhardy plan. “And then what?? They chase us on the ground?”_

_“I don’t know,” Armin says, casting wary eyes at the titans that have almost reached them, “But it’s the only plan we’ve got.”_

_Jean pauses and then nods, quickly. “We go when I say, alright?” Armin asserts._

_“Okay,” Jean agrees. Then, he pulls both swords out of the sheaths and fiddles with the handles. “Uh, Armin?”_  
“Yeah?”  
“It’s been nice knowing you.” 

_Armin took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and touched the flower in his jacket pocket. **This might be it, Eren,** he thought of his friend, **I hope you make it to the ocean, even if I don’t.**_

_“You too, Jean.”_

_Thunder claps in the sky. The titans approach. He and Jean do not speak for the next minute. After that minute has passed. Armin readies himself, checks his gear, and takes a deep breath. When he yells, “Go!” The volume of his own voice surprises him._

Armin stared at Sasha’s split body and is reminded, suddenly and unpleasantly, of Marco. He did not cry, however, and instead closed his eyes. He heard Jean’s voice calling for him from afar, and yelled back a fairly unintelligible reply of, “Be there in a minute!”

He opened his eyes and swallowed down the lump of grief once more, not allowing it to spill out into his physical body or derail his mental state, weak as it was.

Carefully, he picked the Cyclamen flower out of his pocket and put it next to the daisy in Sasha’s hand, like some sort of sick funeral bouquet.

_Goodbye._


	4. Promises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I recommend that you listen to my original Reibert song while reading this chapter: https://catcorbet.bandcamp.com/track/what-well-always-be-demo
> 
> (some of the song lyrics made their way into this chapter, too!)

Bertholdt felt Reiner’s eyes on him through the campfire flames, but he didn’t look back at him. He didn’t have the emotional strength to face Reiner, right now. At least one of them had to be emotionally coherent at all times, and Reiner was still shaking with grief, so that person had to be Bertl.

The flickering light created shadows on the walls of the cave that resembled monsters from the nightmares of Bertholdt’s childhood. After he kicked in the wall of Shinganshina district, well..... the nightmares went away. Nothing in a dream could possibly be as terrifying and horrible as real-life. Causing the death of thousands of people in a single day can do that to a person. And he was, oh, you know, eleven.

The cave shadows reenacted a scene from his past as he watched with a blank expression.

_Bertholdt it crying in a back alleyway. The streets outside are crowded, but this one is a dead end and it’s a place where he can be alone. Wall Maria has just been broken and everyone relocated to Wall Rose. It’s difficult for everyone, but Bertholdt knows that no one has it as hard as him._

_After all, he caused it._

_This thought only sends him into another fit of sobbing with his legs pulled up to his chest and his face in his arms. Some soldiers walk by the opening of the alleyway, chattering about food regulations. Out of the corner of his eye, one of them spots Bertholdt and wanders into the alleyway._

_“Hey, kid, are you alright? Do you have family somewhere?” The soldier questions, leaving Bertholdt feeling panicked as he tries to hide his tear-stained face._

_Then, as if drawn by a miracle, another boy runs down the alleyway to stop in front of the soldier. “Yep!” The blond boy answers for Bertholdt, “I’m his family, and we’re doin’ just fine.”_

_Shrugging, the soldier walks back to his comrades and away from the two boys. Once they are out of earshot, Bertholdt mutters, “Go away, Reiner,” Turning away from the blond kid next front of him._

_Reiner doesn’t leave. Instead, he plops down next to Bertholdt, his legs criss-crossed. “Nah, Bert. Why are you so upset?”_

_Feeling frustration bubbling up inside of him, Bertholdt snaps his head up to look at Reiner, displaying reddened, tear-stained cheeks. “What do you **think**?” He retorts, sneering._

_Reiner’s grin drops away into a serious expression. “I know,” he blurts, averting his eyes._

_A strange and awkward silence permeates the air around them for a few minutes. A breeze enters the alleyway, ruffling the thin hair of both boys. Somewhere, a mother shrieks at her children. Birds chatter overhead. In that moment. Bertholdt wishes that he could join them and fly away, far away. If he were a bird, he would escape these walls do whatever he wanted. If he were a bird, he.... he wouldn’t be able to turn into a titan._

_Suddenly, Reiner sits up and shifts. Then, he plants a small kiss on Bertholdt’s cheek. Both of them turn beet red and look in opposite directions, but eventually they bring their heads back around to look at each other.  
“Reiner....” Bertholdt utters, bringing his hand up to touch the place on his cheek where Reiner had kissed him. _

_A panicked expression on his face, the blond boy blurts out, “I just wanted to cheer you up and people who care about each other give each other kisses and hugs to make them feel better so I thought it might work for you but I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have--”_

_Bertholdt leans forward and kisses Reiner quickly on the mouth, then pulls him in for a hug. “It’s okay, it helped, you were right,” he says, and now Reiner is crying, too and he’s really glad that no one seems to be in the area right now._

_Choked up, Reiner pulls away and grabs Bertl’s hands, looking into his eyes. The world seems to become still, as if the two of them are in their own little bubble, separate from everyone and everything else._

_“You know,” Reiner suggests, cocking his head slightly to one side, “We could stop. We could just.... you know, not do it. If that would make you feel better.” His tone seems unsure, but Bertl knows that he’s being honest, and that’s what worries him. He pulls out of Reiner’s grip and stands up._

_“You don’t get it, do you?” He says, with a tad bit more spite in his voice than necessary, “This never ends. We can’t stop and we can’t not finish the job. You act like we can just go back but we can’t, we--” his voice breaks, but he continues, “we can’t fix things, we can’t do anything except what we’re already doing, okay?”_

_On the last word, he swivels around to find a wide-eyed Reiner with tears in his eyes. Bertholdt immediately starts to feel bad, but Reiner nods and wipes away his tears before he can say he is sorry._

_“You’re right,” Reiner speaks, standing up and grabbing Bertholdt’s hand in an iron grip. He pulls a small knife out of his jacket pocket and, before Bertl can object, cuts a deep line into both of their palms. He flips the knife closed and puts it back in his pocket, jamming the two cuts on their separate hands together._

_“Just us, from now on, okay? You and me against the world.” He states, looking into Bertholdt’s eyes with a kind of stony strength that he admires._

_“But what about Annie?” Bertholdt manages to slur, despite the pain his his palm and the remnants of a kiss on his lips and the image of Reiner’s expression burned into his retinas._

_“Use her, trust her, don’t rely on her. I am the only one on whom you can rely from now on, and you are the only one on whom **I** can rely.” _

_Bertholdt nods and presses his palm even harder into Reiner’s._

The memory prompted Bertholdt to look at his palm. Of course, there was nothing there. No lines, no scars, not even any callouses. Still, he kind of wished that there was. Oddly enough, the memory from that day that had stuck with him through time was the memory of the exact texture of Reiner’s lips when they touched his. Rough, but still soft, somehow. Cracked, but not visibly so. 

He dared to glance at Reiner through the dying flames of their fire. Sure enough, he was sitting in the same position as before, except he was not looking at Bertl anymore. He was staring into space, lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” Bertholdt inquired of him, trying to get them out of this unbearable flashback-inducing silence. Reiner paused and then spoke, still not looking at his comrade.

“You know, she got out of that crystal a month ago. Imagine being trapped for months and then coming out and dying right off the bat. It’s fucked up.”

Bertholdt didn’t know what to say, so he chose silence. Reiner, however continued.

“What was her favorite food, Bertholdt? Did you ever ask her? Did anyone ever ask?”

Silence, and then more talking.

“I’ll never know, now, and it kills me. What were her hobbies, other than fighting? Did.... did we ever say we cared about her? Ugh, fuck.” Reiner rubbed his face, obviously trying not to succumb to exhaustion or grief again. Not able to bear watching his friend so upset, Bertl walked over to Reiner’s side of the cave. 

In the dimly-lit cave, Reiner cried and Bertholdt held him. _Nothing’s changed,_ he thought as he ran a single hand through his blond hair. _Nothing has changed except that we’ve grown older and more broken._ After a few minutes, Bertholdt pulled away. Reiner looked up for the cause, and was met by his friend’s lips. Pushing Reiner’s torso back against the slope of the cave, Bertl kissed him. 

The fire was going out, but the heat the two of them were generating was enough to keep them warm. 

Grabbing Reiner’s chin, he forcefully moved his head to the most convenient angle. With the precision of one who has had lots of practice, he undid Reiner’s harnesses and slid them off of his body, then did the same with his own. 

When he looked at Reiner again, the boy was grinning and had a needy look in his eyes. “Just like old times, eh, Fubar?” 

Chuckling, Bertl straddled Reiner’s waist and kissed him again. A gust of wind blew into the small cave, weakening their fire even more. Neither of them noticed or cared. Their lips were chapped from dehydration, but there was something rough and beautiful about the kiss and the way it lasted, with breaks only to breath. The texture of Reiner’s lips was so similar to that first time that Bertl could barely focus. He broke away and looked into Reiner’s eyes.

“Do you--” He began, “Do you remember the promise we made when we were eleven?”

At first, Reiner didn’t answer and Bertl began to regret mentioning it in the first place. Soon, however, his hand reached up and brushed some of Bertholdt’s hair behind his ear, a slight smile ghosting over his complexion.

“Yeah, of course I remember.”

“You and me, still?” Bertholdt queried, looking for some sort of perfect solution in the confirmation of a promise they had made many, many years ago. What was he looking for, in the end? Completion? Affirmation?

“You and me, man, until the day we die.”

As those words spilled out of Reiner’s mouth, Bertholdt decided that what he really wanted, right then and there, in the cold, cramped cave, was to kiss this stupid, wonderful, gorgeous teenage boy.

And so, while titans roamed freely in the world outside and hundreds of soldiers bled dry in the dirt, he did.


End file.
